my sleepers will wake in another America
I'm pretty sure that the title to this post - "My dreamers will wake in another America" is a line of poetry from a Patti Smith album cover from the 1970s. But who wrote it originally? Or am I just making it up? I feel a bit haunted.
So anyway.
Things have been really, really bad at my job. I've had three weeks in a row of working eighty hours a week or more due to a series of catastrophes which are not my fault and not within my power to fix but which can be, with huge effort, made marginally less catastrophic for a number of people who do not include me. But the election was making me so stressed that I wasn't going to get any more done for a few days anyway. So Fishwhistle and I hopped in the car and came to New York, with great flocks of geese overhead moving in more or less the same direction.
It would have been a faster drive coming here except that we were almost at the border when I said, er, whoops, I seem to have left my passport at home. I am a little stressed. So we had to go all the way home to get it.
On the way here I was thinking about Moby Dick, which I reread this summer and loved even more than I loved it the first time, and how much Obama's story and the story of this campaign is a Melville story. But let's hope Queequeeg gets to save us all this time and Ahab gets some sense talked into him at the last moment.
Anyway we are staying on Idlerat's couch and yeterday we did some phone banking downtown and I had good intentions about shopping and museums and looking up friends and trying to relax today, but no, that's not going to happen, we're going to do more phone banking because that's the only thing I can imagine doing right now. And then we will go watch the results chez Mulberry Field with Bow and Idlerat and Telurian and Stillwell and Two Toed Sloth and a couple of other people who have no pseudonyms that I'm aware of, people I have known and loved and engaged in politics with for ... decades, imagine that. So really, yeah, I had to be here.
And then we'll get back in the car and go home again.
Yesterday at the phone bank we met a whole big group of African-descended French tourists, and an expat like us from Montreal who impulsively came down to work because how could you not? On the street we spoke to a New Yorker who was selling Obama buttons and told us she was praying for him, and a Bangledeshi immigrant who was selling Obama buttons who had a detailed critique of the Democrat's health plan, and an undecided voter - possibly swayed by the many, many Obama buttons on Fishwhistle's coat and hat - who stopped us a street corner to tell us that he was undecided but he didn't want to talk about it. The subway was full of people talking about McCain's Saturday Night Live appearance and where they're voting. Oh, and a guy sang a beautiful version of that gospel song whose name I never remember:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water
It's the fire next time
He banged on the poles and the overhead railing of the subway car for percussion. Not apropos, I hope, but beautiful.
We should try to sleep a bit more now or we'll be useless at the phone bank.
...
So anyway.
Things have been really, really bad at my job. I've had three weeks in a row of working eighty hours a week or more due to a series of catastrophes which are not my fault and not within my power to fix but which can be, with huge effort, made marginally less catastrophic for a number of people who do not include me. But the election was making me so stressed that I wasn't going to get any more done for a few days anyway. So Fishwhistle and I hopped in the car and came to New York, with great flocks of geese overhead moving in more or less the same direction.
It would have been a faster drive coming here except that we were almost at the border when I said, er, whoops, I seem to have left my passport at home. I am a little stressed. So we had to go all the way home to get it.
On the way here I was thinking about Moby Dick, which I reread this summer and loved even more than I loved it the first time, and how much Obama's story and the story of this campaign is a Melville story. But let's hope Queequeeg gets to save us all this time and Ahab gets some sense talked into him at the last moment.
Anyway we are staying on Idlerat's couch and yeterday we did some phone banking downtown and I had good intentions about shopping and museums and looking up friends and trying to relax today, but no, that's not going to happen, we're going to do more phone banking because that's the only thing I can imagine doing right now. And then we will go watch the results chez Mulberry Field with Bow and Idlerat and Telurian and Stillwell and Two Toed Sloth and a couple of other people who have no pseudonyms that I'm aware of, people I have known and loved and engaged in politics with for ... decades, imagine that. So really, yeah, I had to be here.
And then we'll get back in the car and go home again.
Yesterday at the phone bank we met a whole big group of African-descended French tourists, and an expat like us from Montreal who impulsively came down to work because how could you not? On the street we spoke to a New Yorker who was selling Obama buttons and told us she was praying for him, and a Bangledeshi immigrant who was selling Obama buttons who had a detailed critique of the Democrat's health plan, and an undecided voter - possibly swayed by the many, many Obama buttons on Fishwhistle's coat and hat - who stopped us a street corner to tell us that he was undecided but he didn't want to talk about it. The subway was full of people talking about McCain's Saturday Night Live appearance and where they're voting. Oh, and a guy sang a beautiful version of that gospel song whose name I never remember:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water
It's the fire next time
He banged on the poles and the overhead railing of the subway car for percussion. Not apropos, I hope, but beautiful.
We should try to sleep a bit more now or we'll be useless at the phone bank.
...